Laxalt wants Nevada Supreme Court to re-address search and seizure ruling

ELKO — The Nevada Supreme Court will have to revisit a decision it made last year about search-and-seizure rules in a case stemming from the arrest here of a California man, Nevada state Attorney General Adam Laxalt said.

Laxalt pointed to a recent ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in a similar case from Utah that focused on the key Fourth Amendment question of how long police can detain a person without probable cause.

“These Fourth Amendment questions have divided Nevada courts and others nationwide,” Laxalt said Monday in statement that compared State of Nevada v. Torres with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Strieff v. Utah.

In the Utah case, the court found June 20 that if there’s no flagrant police misconduct, evidence seized in the service of a valid warrant is admissible in court.

In Nevada, the state high court decided in 2015 that Elko Police Officer Jeremy Shelley didn’t improperly detain Ralph Torres of Ontario, California, after Torres produced identification showing he was old enough to be out past curfew.

Court records say Torres was wearing a sweatshirt with the hood pulled over his head when Shelley stopped him in February 2008 near a downtown Elko bridge. Shelley said he thought Torres appeared to be intoxicated and might have been a juvenile violating curfew.

Although Shelley’s initial suspicions weren’t proved true, he kept Torres’ identification long enough to learn that Torres was sought on a felony warrant in California. Shelley then found that Torres had a .22-caliber gun in his pocket.

Torres pleaded guilty later to an ex-felon firearm possession charge.

The Nevada Supreme Court reversed Torres’ conviction in 2015 after he argued that his continued detention while his identity was being checked violated his Fourth Amendment rights.

The state attorney general argued the state high court didn’t give appropriate weight to the officer’s testimony that he needed time to check Torres’ identification because people often hand him fake or altered identification.